Nicholas (nwhyte) wrote,
Nicholas
nwhyte

Kiss of Death

The latest in the main range of Big Finish's Doctor Who stories, this has the reunited team of the Fifth Doctor, Turlough, Tegan and an older Nyssa starting off with taking a holiday which descends into a surprising exploration of Turlough's past. By complete coincidence I was listening to this over the same four days this week that I rewatched Frontios, a story with some very similar elements - underground mysteries, Turlough's past, Turlough's romantic interest - which Kiss of Death does rather better. (In fairness to Frontios, there are also some things that it does well enough which Kiss of Death does not try to do at all.) As with any established companion, giving Turlough an extra back story was always a bit risky, and spinoff fiction has on occasion done this as clumsily as the TV series (eg Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma). But Stephen Cole does it really well here; he has confessed in previous commentaries to his fascination with Turlough as a character, and now he has written what is, and will probably remain, the best Turlough story. I can strongly recommend Kiss of Death to any fan who knows a bit about Turlough but doesn't utterly hate him.

The one disappointment is the aural realisation of the hidden monster, the Morass, whose voice was distorted beyond comprehensibility. It's really rare for BF to have serious problems in this regard - the only other case I can remember was a Bernice Summerfield play, The Poison Seas, which featured Sea Devils so sibilant that their dialogue could not be made out. But it's disappointing when it happens.
Tags: doctor who, doctor who: 05, doctor who: audio, writer: stephen cole
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